


the end, the end, the end

by dhona



Category: Final Fantasy XV
Genre: Canon Compliant, Character Study, F/F, Final Fantasy XV Spoilers
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-05-29
Updated: 2019-05-29
Packaged: 2020-03-27 15:01:04
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,538
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/19015273
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/dhona/pseuds/dhona
Summary: The end must be near, she thinks for the umpteenth time that day. (Spoilers for the main game, references to Episode Ardyn and Dawn of the Future)





	the end, the end, the end

Odd, Luna thinks. Getting stabbed doesn’t hurt as much as she’d expect it to.

It was all so quick; the knife slid in and suddenly she’s on the ground with no recollection of what had happened. But there’s no pain, and she feels quite lucid. Clear-headed, even.

She tries to stand up, and it is with a vague sense of surprise that she realises she can’t quite manage it.

The man before her makes some sort of declaration, something mocking Noctis, so she attempts a reply. “I will pass the ring to the rightful King,” she intones, and the words are underlaid with a satisfying determination. That’s good, that’s more like her. The Oracle can’t be distracted from her duty by petty injuries like this.

Her response catches Izunia’s attention, and he grabs her chin and looks into her eyes.

Something wells up inside of her then, filling her limbs with purpose and her heart with hope, something old and alien and frustratingly in love with the Niflheim chancellor. Luna’s thoughts feel more distant than ever. “Ardyn,” her mind echoes as her arms reach out for him, “Ardyn— surely you are still—”

“When the prophecy is fulfilled, all in thrall to darkness shall know peace,” she says.

The voice that comes out of her sounds like a stranger’s. The man’s – demon’s? – face softens and there is a flash of tired humanity, but it lasts only a second before he is consumed with anger and strikes her down again.

And yet that _thing_ inside her continues to cry out for him.

Some part of her is indignant at this most recent occurrence. She’s never been free, but to think that she’s not free even to hate her killer! And death, death she was prepared for; death at the hands of an enraged Astral, death flashing from an Imperial gun, death by the slow wilting of her body… But death, like this? Knifed in the gut just to provoke an immature princeling? (No, no, that’s not what you think of Noctis, he’s the Chosen King and you love him, you love him, you love him—)

But gods above, she still has work to do. Eos won’t save itself, and as long as the pact with the Hydrean remains unforged, her duty is not yet done.

So she revives Noctis, and when he falls she is there to catch him.

* * *

 Luna opens her eyes to find rows upon rows of sylleblossoms and a little boy at her feet and for a moment, she is confused.

“Luna?”

Noctis’s voice is the same as she remembers from a lifetime ago, and a wave of sadness comes over her. He was only eight when they first met, and so nervous that the hand Luna had shaken was sweaty and trembling. But that shyness disappeared over the course of his few months in Tenebrae, and by the end would happily spend hours in Luna’s room babbling happily about his life in Insomnia and playing with Pryna.

It was during one of those hours that she realised how horrific her visions were. She had never imagined that he’d be so ordinary, so full of life despite the fate laid upon him, and in that moment, she finally understood her role in the prophecy. If he was to fight the encroaching darkness, she would gladly walk beside him and ease his burden however she could.

Luna smiles, and offers up a word of thanks to the gods for this last gift. The memory had lost some of its lustre over the years, but it is vivid now, and she is anchored once more even as her heart breaks. He is still a child at heart, and she wishes she could stay with him longer… But her time is nearly up, and now there is only one more thing she can do.

She summons up all her love for the saviour of Eos and speaks the words she wanted her mother to, and she does not cry, she is beautiful and elegant and everything else Noctis needs her to be as the waters claim her.

* * *

Darkness.

When she comes to, it’s immediately obvious that it’s not a dream. Water blurs her eyes and dulls her ears, and her body screams with the pain of her wound and the lack of oxygen. Her mouth opens involuntarily, trying to draw breath, and liquid rushes in.

Luna feels tears filling up in her eyes as she chokes. When will she actually get to die? She had her second chance, her duty to both her people and Noctis has been fulfilled, she made a lovely exit. There’s nothing left for her here. Staying alive will only mean having to wait that much more before being released, it hurts and she can’t breathe and she’s so cold…

An idle question crosses her dimming consciousness.

How would it feel to be the Hydrean, for her mortal vessel to be strong and slick and serpentine? The seas would make a fine home, sun-dappled on the surface and cool in the depths (just like her family house in Tenebrae). She could sleep all day and rise only when the whim took her (she hasn’t had a full night’s rest since the eve of the peace treaty). Rather than seeking out the needy, people would come to see her from all across the land (she is so sick of travelling, Niflheim airships rattle and judder all throughout a flight). And if she didn’t feel like it, she could turn them away; if they were ungrateful, she could leave them – she wouldn’t throw a tantrum like Leviathan, that’s too undignified – and all would be delightfully, gloriously quiet…

Then again, the well-trained part of Luna thinks, that’s probably why the Hydrean doesn’t look human.

She laughs dazedly.

The pain is slowly fading. Her lungs are stilling, no longer fighting to expel water… She feels numb in both flesh and spirit. Thoughts drift lazily out of her grasp.

The end must be near, she thinks for the umpteenth time that day.

* * *

She is somehow still not dead.

She cannot feel much of anything any more. Her body seems distant, a puppet whose strings have been cut, and her vision has taken on the crackling blackness that lies behind closed eyelids.

Luna does not regret. She made her choices willingly, she did all she set out to do.

She was very young when her mother sat her down and told her, “You must be brave, Luna, and good. You must be brave and good enough for four men, for a Lucian king always walks with his brothers, but an Oracle must walk alone.” She paused. “It is much harder when there is no-one to remind you of it.”

And because Luna was so young, she had replied, “But my history teacher said that not all of the kings were male! And the kingsguard too!” She knew that wasn’t what her mother was talking about, but being all alone didn’t sound like much fun, and Luna was a stubborn girl.

Her mother laughed and agreed, so she continued. “And anyway, why do Oracles have to be alone when kings don’t?”

That smile faded quickly enough, and the queen snapped, “Enough questions.” Upon seeing Luna shrink from her, she lowered her voice, but still she looked into her daughter’s eyes with a starting seriousness, and said: “The rule stands. Learn it well.”

That expression stuck with Luna when the weight of the words did not, and when her mother clasped her hand in the middle of a burning forest and fixed her with that same look seven years later, she remembered the lesson all the better.

And so, Luna tried. Each and every day, she tried to be brave and to be good, and she thinks herself reasonably successful in that regard.

(“Full marks,” her tutors would say to her when handing back her test papers, and the pronouncement would usually be accompanied by a pleased smile. She has always lived up to expectations.)

For the first time in her life, Luna wonders whether she misread the question. Is dying meant to feel so _hollow_?

* * *

 Luna has a secret. Just one, and one she has hidden well.

Her secret is this: Noctis may not have grown up much, but she hasn’t either. Deep down, she is still the child who didn’t want to be alone.

She knows this is foolish. Her father doted upon her, when he was still around, and her mother taught her how to be a woman and an Oracle. Her brother has been with her all the way, and she has known of the king she was promised to ever since she was a child. She has never really been alone, whatever her mother might have said.

But there are moments, after many an hour of purifications, or a particularly drawn-out conference with the Astrals, or round after round of public addresses, when the darkness will murmur: _your mother was right._

Sometimes Luna thinks that she lost all her family by the age of twelve. Her father, to divorce; her mother, to fire and metal; her brother, to the Empire. (She stayed for Ravus because in his position, she would have hated to be left behind. It turned out that he would be the one to do the leaving, later.) Sometimes she thinks about how she hasn’t seen Noctis since her fateful choice not to go with him and King Regis.

And then she tells herself that there are others, kind civilians and loyal servants, people who love and support her. But it’s different. However much they may adore or admire or sympathise with her, she will always be a myth to them, a figure of prophecy rather than an actual person. So she prays that she might see Noctis again, and that this time, they might face destiny together.

(This too is foolish. Prompto and King Regis and Weskham have all told her of a young man who is still wonderfully human, a king who grumbles when he can’t sleep in and plays mobile games with his friends and is happiest with a fishing rod in hand. Luna’s promised one will not understand her any more than he did twelve years ago. And anyway, he will not be alone, not even at the end: the prophecy speaks of how he will die sitting on his throne surrounded by his family, and die again surrounded by his brothers-in-arms. Perhaps she never really had a place by his side, but she had hoped anyway, and now it is too late.)

If she was still in control of her body, this is probably where she would start crying, Luna thinks. There isn’t anybody to hide her tears from here, not her mother, not Noctis, not the Imperials, not the plague-ridden people.

“Wherefore does the lady weep?” says a sylleblossom-sweet voice out of her memories, and she cries all the harder.

When she started being able to commune with the Astrals, she was too little to comprehend their words. The ever-ingenious Sword-King found a way around this by waiting for sunfall, when the border between mortal and divine was weakest, and sending her glimpses of a terrible future. It was an effective solution. Luna’s attempts to parse those glimpses provided the detail the prophecy had previously lacked, and when her mother passed, she was better equipped than any predecessor to take her place as Oracle.

Of course, there was a downside: few adults would be able to stomach the reality Bahamut presented to them, much less a child, and little Luna often woke up in the middle of the night with a face stained with tears.And yet as these midnight awakenings became a consistent feature of Luna’s childhood, equally consistent was how Gentiana would comfort her afterwards. She would smooth her robes – how they shimmered, black and gold in the darkness – and sit on Luna’s bed and ask, “Wherefore does the lady weep?” And Luna would tell her, and when her tears were finally dry, Gentiana would slide her hand over her eyes ever so gently and whisper, “Sleep.” And Luna would.

(Once, Gentiana had leaned down and kissed her brow. Luna did not think much of it then, but... Occasionally she will wish, completely irrationally, that the nightmares hadn’t ended when she had learned to speak with the gods.)

Their relationship isn’t like that anymore. The more Luna settled into her role as Oracle, the more distant Gentiana became, as if shedding her humanity the closer Luna drew to the Astrals. She began to speak in riddles, her already-archaic language turning even more impenetrable, and it became rare for her to approach Luna outside of discussing Astral matters.

On days when Luna’s feeling particularly honest, she will admit that it is among the separations she mourned most.

That said, as separations go, this one was never especially complete. Gentiana may have become less inclined to talk, but she smiled just as frequently, and her eyes never lost the glitter of humour that so enchanted Luna as a child. There were other things, too. Luna storming back to her room after Ravus told her he was enlisting in the Niflheim army, only to find Pryna waiting by her bed and a red leather notebook on her nightstand. A cup of green tea, impeccably brewed and heated to just the right temperature, always greeting her in the evenings when she feels ready to collapse. The posies of freshly-picked sylleblossoms that appear in her airship quarters without fail despite magitek troopers hardly being known for their romantic streak.

Maybe the Glacian simply preferred to show her care obliquely, to refract it like sunlight through ice. Either way, it was undeniable that something had shifted, and that is why, when Gentiana found her weeping in the flower field and asked that question of her, Luna knew at once that she would not be seeing her again.

“I can’t do this without you,” she did not say.

“Please stay with me,” she did not beg.

She merely leaned into the soft fingertips on her wet cheek, tried to sear the press of warm hands into her heart, and said, “I am undeserving of your kindness.” And she did not tremble at the sight of that impossibly sad smile, she did not long to wipe away those tears, she did not wish she could take Gentiana in her arms.

Luna does not regret. She made her choices willingly, she did all she set out to do. She is brave and she is good. She is strong enough to walk alone.

It’s strange. She can imagine fingers stroking her eyelids closed. And it’s even stranger that she feels compelled to choke back a sob.

But the touch is magic, same as it always was, and dissipates the turmoil to leave only a soft melancholy.

“Luna...” She can hear that fond, familiar tone again. She remembers how her breathing would slow, and how the world would shrink to a single word. The universe made and remade to the sound of woman’s voice.

“Sleep awhile.”

And then there is no king, no Oracle, no Eos: only peace, peace, peace.

**Author's Note:**

> gotta love how se's pretending they've fixed luna by having her be all like "i don't need no destiny!" in dawn of the future when like... literally nothing changes..... she’s still a flat-ass female lead defined exclusively by her sense of duty and her love of noctis… (dotf hasn’t been released in english yet so there’s still a chance she’ll be fleshed out in the internal narration, if not the broad plot points, but i’m not holding my breath) anyway i snapped and wrote this fic in honor of how luna is such a non-character that even her death is so beautiful you could make a nice desktop wallpaper out of it
> 
> tl;dr fuck you se, if you’re not gonna do right by luna, i will


End file.
